Lol All any intelligent person has to do is google "slucas at...

< Previous | Home | Next >

Reply to Msg 18728

Lol All any intelligent person has to do is google "slucas at iri.org" to tell who's lying here. You foreign meddlers can learn Creole all you want but you have no soul when you speak it. You're not fooling anyone except yourselves.

You liked that did you?

Here's more dear

By WALT BOGDANICH and JENNY NORDBERG
Published: January 29, 2006

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- As his plane lifted off the runway here in August 2003, Brian Dean Curran rewound his last, bleak days as the American ambassador in this tormented land.

Haiti, Mr. Curran feared, was headed toward a cataclysm, another violent uncoupling of its once jubilant embrace of democracy more than a decade before.

He had come here hoping to help that tenuous democracy grow. Now he was leaving in anger and foreboding

Mr. Curran accused the democracy-building group, the International Republican Institute, of trying to undermine the reconciliation process after disputed 2000 Senate elections threw Haiti into a violent political crisis.

The group's leader in Haiti, Stanley Lucas, an avowed Aristide opponent from the Haitian elite, counseled the opposition to stand firm, and not work with Mr. Aristide, as a way to cripple his government and drive him from power, said Mr. Curran, whose account is supported in crucial parts by other diplomats and opposition figures.

Many of these people spoke publicly about the events for the first time.

Mr. Curran, a 30-year Foreign Service veteran and a Clinton appointee retained by President Bush, also accused Mr. Lucas of telling the opposition that he, not the ambassador, represented the Bush administration's true intentions.

Records show that Mr. Curran warned his bosses in Washington that Mr. Lucas's behavior was contrary to American policy and "risked us being accused of attempting to destabilize the government." Yet when he asked for tighter controls over the I.R.I. in the summer of 2002, he hit a roadblock after high officials in the State Department and National Security Council expressed support for the pro-democracy group, an American aid official wrote at the time.

The International Republican Institute is one of several prominent nonprofit groups that receive federal funds to help countries develop the mechanisms of democracy, like campaigning and election monitoring.

Of all the groups, though, the I.R.I. is closest to the administration.

President Bush picked its president, Lorne W. Craner, to run his administration's democracy-building efforts.

The institute, which works in more than 60 countries, has seen its federal financing nearly triple in three years, from $26 million in 2003 to $75 million in 2005. Last spring, at an I.R.I. fund-raiser, Mr. Bush called democracy-building "a growth industry."

These groups walk a fine line. Under federal guidelines, they are supposed to nurture democracy in a nonpartisan way, lest they be accused of meddling in the affairs of sovereign nations.

But in Haiti, according to diplomats, Mr. Lucas actively worked against President Aristide.

Colin L. Powell, the secretary of state at the time, said that the American policy in Haiti was what Mr. Curran believed it to be, and that the United States stood by Mr. Aristide until the last few days of his presidency.

But in a recent interview, Otto J. Reich, who served under Mr. Powell as the State Department's top official on Latin America, said that a subtle shift in policy away from Mr. Aristide had taken place after Mr. Bush became president -- as Mr. Curran and others had suspected.

"There was a change in policy that was perhaps not well perceived by some people in the embassy," Mr. Reich said, referring to Mr. Curran.

"We wanted to change, to give the Haitians an opportunity to choose a democratic leader," said Mr. Reich, one of a group of newly ascendant policy makers who feared the rise of leftist governments in Latin America.

Told of that statement, Mr. Curran said, "That Reich would admit that a different policy was in effect totally vindicates my suspicions, as well as confirms what an amateur crowd was in charge in Washington."

Bridging the divide between Mr. Aristide and his opponents would have been difficult in even the best of circumstances.

But what emerges from the events in Haiti is a portrait of how the effort to nurture democracy became entangled in the ideological wars and partisan rivalries of Washington.

"What you had was the constant undermining of the credibility of the negotiators," said Luigi R. Einaudi, a respected veteran diplomat who led the international effort to find a political settlement on behalf of the Organization of American States.

The I.R.I. did not permit The New York Times to interview Mr. Lucas, but in a response to written questions, he denied trying to undermine American policy.

"I never told the opposition not to negotiate," Mr. Lucas said in an e-mail message.

Georges A. Fauriol, the I.R.I.'s senior vice president, said that his group faithfully tried to represent "the ideals of the American democratic system," and that he personally pressed the opposition to compromise.

Mr. Fauriol blamed "innuendos and political interests" for the complaints of Mr. Curran and others.

He also said Mr. Curran never gave him the specifics that he needed to act against Mr. Lucas, whom he called "one of our best political party trainers."

In Haiti, Mr. Lucas's partisan activities were well known.

Evans Paul, a leader of the anti-Aristide movement and now a presidential candidate, said Mr. Lucas's stand against negotiating was "a bit too harsh" even for some in the opposition

With Washington's approval, Mr. Lucas used taxpayer money to fly hundreds of opposition members -- but no one from Mr. Aristide's Lavalas party -- to a hotel in the Dominican Republic for political training that began in late 2002. Two leaders of the armed rebellion told The Times that they were in the same hotel during some of those meetings, but did not attend

Even so, Mr. Curran said, his mission was clear.

"The promotion of democracy was at the very heart of what I was doing in Haiti," he said. Clear, too, was how to go about that: supporting Mr. Aristide's right to office while working to foster a compromise.

"That was the officially stated policy," Mr. Curran said. "Those were my instructions."

Mr. Curran was supposed to have help from the I.R.I., which had been active in Haiti since 1990. Along with the National Democratic Institute, the I.R.I. was formed in the early 1980's after President Ronald Reagan called on Americans to fight totalitarianism.

Its board includes Republican foreign-policy heavyweights and lobbyists, and its chairman is Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, who did not answer requests for an interview.

The group's financing comes from the Agency for International Development, as well as the State Department, foundations and corporations like Halliburton and Chevron.

More than its sister group, the International Republican Institute tends to work in countries "it views as being strategically important to U.S. national foreign policy interests," according to a 1999 report by the international development agency.

The I.R.I.'s Republican affiliations did not go unnoticed on the streets of Port-au-Prince.

Graffiti condemning the I.R.I. had been showing up for some time, the work of Aristide supporters.

"I think they distrusted I.R.I. as an organization because they were affiliated with the Republican Party, and Lavalas just felt the Republican Party was out to get them," said David Adams, a former A.I.D. mission director in Haiti.

And there was one more reason, he said: Stanley Lucas, the I.R.I.'s leader in Haiti.

Mr. Lucas, who said he grew up in the United States and Haiti and worked as a part-time Haitian civil servant, came from a land-owning family.

That background, along with his politics, "sends a very provocative message, I think, to those supporting Aristide," said Mr. Maguire, who runs the international affairs program at Trinity University in Washington.

Mr. Lucas joined the I.R.I. in 1993 and took over its Haiti program five years later.

With his good looks, sociability and fluency in Creole, French and English, he moved easily between Port-au-Prince and Capitol Hill. "He's the Denzel Washington of Haiti," one A.I.D. official said. That he was a karate champion only added to his aura.

The anti-Aristide message had currency around Washington.

Mr. Einaudi, the veteran diplomat, recalled attending the I.R.I.'s 2001 fund-raising dinner and being surrounded by a half-dozen Haitian businessmen sounding a common cry: "We were foolish to think that we could do anything with Aristide.

That it was impossible to negotiate with him. That it was necessary to get rid of him."

A year later, the I.R.I. created a stir when it issued a press release praising the attempted overthrow of Hugo Chávez, the elected president of Venezuela and a confrontational populist, who, like Mr. Aristide, was seen as a threat by some in Washington.

The institute has since told The Times that praising the attempted coup was wrong.

Mr. Lucas had been to Venezuela seven times for the I.R.I., but he was not there at the time of the coup. Instead, he was focusing on Haiti, where his work was creating another stir for the institute.

No Negotiations, No Compromise

In early 2002, Mr. Curran said, he began receiving troubling reports about Mr. Lucas.

As he urged the opposition in Haiti "to show flexibility," the ambassador said, Mr. Lucas was sending the opposite instructions: "Hang tough.

Don't compromise.

In the end, we'll get rid of Aristide."

As his concern mounted, Mr. Curran asked that Mr. Lucas be removed from the I.R.I.'s Haiti program.

The institute resisted

MUCH MORE HERE: nytimes.com/2006/01/29/internation...

Gonaives, January 23 2010, 5:07 PM

Topic: Is Stanley Lucas the Next President of Haiti? by J

Start a NEW topic or,
Jump to previous | Next Topic >

< Previous | Home | Next >

Messages in this topic

< Previous | Home | Next >